Retailers and other marketers today spend large sums of money building marketing databases. These databases may contain records pertaining to millions of individual consumers, which may be actual customers of the retailer or prospective customers (“prospects”). For each consumer, the database may contain hundreds or even thousands of individual data points. The data may include demographic information, lifestyle information, purchasing habits, and other information pertinent to marketing efforts or marketing analytics. That data may be used to personalize offers, cross-sell products, or even introduce completely new products. In addition, the data is used to understand the effectiveness of the retailers' marketing activities so that they may refine their marketing processes, in order to increase their return on investment. While beneficial to the retailer, this refinement also benefits consumers by bringing those consumers more relevant offers and products, rather than blanketing the consumers with offers or marketing messages that are not relevant to them. Recent investigations reveal that while a small number of consumers wish to “opt out” of targeted marketing efforts and thus prefer to receive untargeted advertising, far more consumers prefer that—if they are to receive marketing messages—that those messages be tailored to accurately reflect those products and services in which they are in fact likely to be interested.
Historically, the effective use of consumer data for making offers and analyzing marketing campaign effectiveness has only been possible in marketing channels where consumer personalized information, such as name, address, telephone number, or email, was readily available. These channels include traditional “offline” channels, such as, for example, direct mail efforts, in which a mailing list of consumers and addresses is used to physically mail marketing offers to individual consumers. Online advertising efforts, such as banner advertising on web pages and various marketing messages that appear when using mobile devices such as smartphones and tables, have historically been largely untargeted efforts because of the lack of identifying information in these channels that makes targeted advertising possible. For example, a consumer browsing to a particular webpage during an online search typically does so without providing any personally identifying information, and consumers are reluctant to reveal such information to all but the most trusted websites and other online providers. Nevertheless, tying these online advertising channels to offline channels would be highly advantageous to retailers and other marketers, since this would allow the marketer to coordinate its marketing efforts across platforms. A marketer could thereby use a more unified, consistent approach in the modern world of multi-channel marketing. The marketer could also much more effectively analyze the results of its multichannel advertising efforts. For example, if such coordination were accomplished, the retailer might be able to better understand the degree to which its online marketing drives offline sales of its products. Thus a marketer who places an online banner advertisement might be able to know how many views of the online banner advertisement actually led to in-store sales at its physical retail locations. This would allow the marketer to more effectively gauge the effectiveness of its various online marketing options, and would thereby result in an advertising marketplace that is more efficient, and better reflects the return on investment for such efforts.
Although the ability to tie offline and online data would thus be highly beneficial to the marketer, the use of offline data in connection with online marketing—most specifically including PII such as name, address, telephone number, and email—creates a risk that the privacy of the consumer may be compromised in the use of this information. Furthermore, because of these important concerns about consumer privacy and in particular the use of PII in online marketing, the use of PII may be prohibited or restricted for certain online marketing applications by applicable laws or regulations, which can vary widely between jurisdictions. Protecting a consumers' online privacy has been recognized as a matter of paramount importance by consumers, governmental entities, individual marketers, and by industry and trade organizations that represent marketers, such as the Direct Marketing Association. Current efforts to improve and better understand the effectiveness of online consumer marketing are thus restricted relative to offline marketing, due to these important limitations on the use of PII for online marketing activities.
Retailers often work closely with marketing services providers in order to improve their marketing efforts. The marketing services providers may have access to large repositories of consumer data, which may include far more information about a retailer's customers than the retailer itself maintains. Such information may enable the marketing services provider to provide data hygiene (i.e., the standardization and deduplication of data) and the enhancement of existing data with additional information valuable in marketing efforts. Such services have long been provided in connection with, for example, direct mail advertising and telemarketing. But bringing this wealth of data into the online world raises important privacy concerns. A method of leveraging all of this data in online marketing, while also ensuring the privacy of personal information about the consumers to whom such marketing is directed, would be highly desirable.
Certain limited efforts have been made in the art to address this disconnection between online and offline marketing, and/or to address concerns about the use of PII for online applications. Some attempts involve the reuse or mild obfuscation of identifiers assigned to consumers and linked to the consumers' PII before putting the identifiers in environments in which the consumers are intended to be de-identified. Because of the reuse of these identifiers, however, these environments do not adequately protect consumers from having their personas re-identified. Examples include using an encrypted identifier into a pixel call; picking up an identifier associated with an individual when logged into a webpage, and then passing that identifier along with site visitation data or ad impression data; and various attempts to use non-dynamic IP addresses.
Many current efforts for identification of online consumers rely on cookies, that is, small files that are written to and stored on a consumer's computer or other device when a particular website is visited. Cookies can contain information that identifies a device used by a consumer without including PII of that consumer. This cookie data is generally nothing more than an identification number. A single consumer may have multiple cookies assigned to their online persona, such as would result from using many different devices while interacting with the online world. Such devices may include a work desktop computer, a home laptop computer, a smartphone, and a tablet, for example. Likewise, a single cookie may actually be associated with multiple consumers, such as two or more people living in the same household who share the use of a single computer. Accurately resolving these cookies to a single instance of a particular consumer may be seen as critical to the success of efforts to use cookies as part of a targeted online advertising effort.
Existing attempts at cookie resolution are often inconsistent and unreliable, because their base system for identifying consumers is not sufficiently accurate. The use of PII to identify a consumer in the context of a cookie is not a workable solution, due to the privacy concerns that have already been described. An effective system for identifying multiple cookies that pertain to the same consumer, but that simultaneously avoids the transmission and/or remote storage of PII in order to protect the privacy of the consumer, would be highly desirable. It may be seen that the problem of cookie resolution is also a factor in analyzing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns; without effective resolution, it is not possible to accurately understand who is actually being marketing to and then attributing a sale (online or offline) to that marketing event. The result is a continuing inefficiency in the marketplace for online advertising, a lower return on investment for marketers, and the delivery of marketing messages to consumers who are uninterested in those messages or find them irrelevant.